The Calligrapher's Secret

by Rafik Schami

  Grandmother venerated the Ottoman sultan and hated everything republican. As a result she did not get on with her brother, who had been appointed the sultan’s ambassador to the United States but then changed sides overnight and became an ardent republican. He was the first president of the Syrian state.

  Ahmad Izzat was rich as Croesus, and had a beautiful house built for him by a Spanish architect in Martyrs’ Square in the city centre. Grandmother Farida had grown up there, surrounded by a large staff of servants. Like her father, she spoke four languages: Arabic, Turkish, French, and English. She was the first Muslim woman to join the Syrian Women’s Literary Club, founded by Christian women from prosperous families in 1922. Under its first president, Madame Moushaka, it supported the opening of reading rooms for women in public libraries, a purely masculine domain at the time. Soon Farida was responsible for correspondence and the organization of readings. She invited women writers from all over the world to Damascus, and proudly used to show any visitor letters from the English author Agatha Christie, who had once been in Damascus herself and had appeared at Grandmother’s salon.

  And she was boundlessly proud of her enlightened father, whose picture in her salon dominated all the other photos. She would often stand in front of it, lost in thought, apparently carrying on a conversation with her dead father, a small, bearded man with clever little eyes and a big nose. In the picture he wore his dress uniform, and had a red fez on his head, as was usual at the time. His chest was covered from shoulders to belt with large eight-pointed stars, various crosses, and medallions hanging from coloured ribbons. To Hamid he looked funny, and far from majestic with all that metal about his person, and if he had not been afraid of his grandmother he would have told her so.

  “An ape in uniform,” whispered Hamid, a remark that he had carefully kept locked inside him for many years.

  Grandmother Farida always gave visitors the feeling that she was granting them a short audience. She was beautiful but seemed to be under great stress. Hamid could not remember a single normal answer to his many questions. For instance, there was the time just before her death when he asked her for a drink of water. “The water in the eyes of the beloved,” she replied, looking into the distance, “comes from the clouds of his heart.”

  Grandfather Hamid greatly respected his wife Farida, and much as he loved cheerfulness, he was faithful to her all his life and put up with all her whims. When he kissed her, once a year, she would speak to him angrily in French, rubbing the place as theatrically as if to wipe traces of grease off her face and adjusting her dress. You would have thought Grandfather had done something indecent.

  When the photograph was taken, his grandmother had eyes only for Abbas, her youngest son. All the others merely had walk-on parts in a play in which she and Abbas took the leading roles. She did all she could to appear young, which could sometimes be embarrassing. The old lady often made up her face heavily, like a young woman of doubtful reputation, but there was no hiding the wrinkles left by time, and rouge unevenly applied gave Farida the look of an ageing clown. As for Abbas, he knew just how to exploit his mother’s crazy devotion to him. He supported everything she did until the day she died, as if he had neither eyes nor ears.

  “That strutting peacock Abbas,” whispered Hamid disapprovingly, and looked through the magnifying glass at the laughing young man, the only man in the photo not wearing a suit, but an elegant white jacket with an open-necked dark shirt. His hand was on his mother’s shoulder, and she was looking up at him as if he were her bridegroom.

  A year before Grandfather’s death, Farida ran a high temperature and suddenly died.

  And not three years after Grandfather’s death, Uncle Abbas had ruined the business. He took to the bottle, fled from his creditors in Damascus, and died a beggar in Beirut. He was buried there anonymously, because no one wanted to transport the body to Damascus.

  Hamid’s father was convinced that God was striking down all his enemies. By that time he was already under his wife’s spell, and his brain was clouded by incense and superstition.

  Strange, Hamid often thought, how his family was coming to ruin in the third generation. The last Farsi in Damascus would die with him, and die where? In prison. A guard told him that he too was the third generation of what had once been a distinguished clan. And where had he landed? In prison too. It was an eternal rule, said the man, coughing: the first generation builds up the family fortunes, the second consolidates them, the third destroys them.

  Hamid’s glance wandered over the photograph once again. What had become of his aunts? He didn’t know. Grandfather had not loved any of them. They wanted no more to do with the family after the quarrel over the inheritance, and his mother’s attempt to gather them around her and try to challenge the will in court came to nothing.

  The photograph had been taken near the great fountain that Grandfather loved so much. Hamid remembered seeing and admiring fish there for the first time in his life.

  The house was still standing. When Hamid went to see it again, three years before his own misfortunes, the inner courtyard seemed to have shrunk by comparison with his memory of it. The present owner, a friendly man, invited him in for coffee when Hamid asked if he could look at the house of his childhood days.

  The owner now, a customs officer, knew nothing about the Farsi family. He had bought the house through an estate agent who didn’t want to talk about the heavily debt-ridden former owners. And the house had brought him bad luck as well, he said; one of his sons had strangled himself by accident playing in the orange tree. After that he had had all the trees in the courtyard felled. Now he wanted to sell the house and move to a spacious apartment in the modern part of town, with his wife and other five children. Was Hamid interested?

  No; he never wanted to see the place again.

  6

  The thunder was moving away from the city, going south, and rain was falling even harder. The light flickered. Hamid got up and, to be on the safe side, lit the candle again.

  He examined his father’s unmoving face. That was how he had looked at the funerals of Hamid’s grandparents, and at Hamid’s first wedding, with a face like a mask of tanned leather. He always wore that mask-like expression, whether he was doing calligraphy or tying his shoelaces.

  Hamid remembered the moment when he had shown his father his first piece of calligraphy. He had been nine or ten years old, and had been practising on his own for years in secret. He forgot to play and sometimes even to eat, but he never spent a single day without practising calligraphy.

  His father was beside himself with fury and envy of the beauty of the Thuluth script in which his son had written out a poem. Hamid had no idea that he had picked the most elegant and demanding script of all. Only masters of calligraphy ever used it. Not his father.

  “You copied that from somewhere,” said his father, dismissing it and turning to his work on a large cinema poster for an Indian feature film.

  No, he said, he had written it out all by himself. They had learnt the poem in school, and he had wanted to give it to his father.

  “You only copied it,” said his father, putting down the brush with which he was filling in the large letters on the poster after tracing their outlines in ink first. He slowly stood up and came toward Hamid, and at that moment the boy knew that he was going to hit him. He tried to protect his head. “Liar!” shouted his father, bringing his fist down. But Hamid wasn’t going to lie to escape any more blows.

  “I wrote it out all by myself,” he cried, begging for mercy, and then he called for his mother. She appeared briefly in the doorway, then just shook her head and went away again without a word.

  “You can’t have done. Even I couldn’t have done it,” said his father. “Where did you copy the poem from?” And he went on hitting the boy mercilessly.

  One blow struck his right eye. At the time he thought he had lost it, and everything went dark.

  Hamid shook his head as he stared at his father�
�s face. “A vacuous face,” he whispered. He saw himself sitting in the dark little broom cupboard, where his fear of rats made him forget his pain. No one came to comfort him, no one brought him a piece of bread or a drink of water. Only a tiny rat put its head out of a hole for a moment, squeaked, looked at him with melancholy eyes, and disappeared again.

  He could hardly sleep that night, because his mother had told him that rats ate the noses and ears of children who told lies.

  “I wasn’t telling lies,” he whispered in a soft, pleading tone, hoping that the rats would understand him.

  He did not drop off to sleep until day began to dawn, and then he dreamed he was walking around in a jungle where the trees, creepers, and bushes were made of nothing but large, brightly coloured letters of different sizes. Each flower, too, was an artfully formed character. He was to tell people about that dream often later, not only because it was the harbinger of a new life for him but also because, since that day, he had disliked large coloured scripts, and loved only black ink.

  However, the dream went on. Somewhere behind him someone was calling his name. Hamid turned briefly and went on. He did not notice some tree roots sticking out of the ground, and he stumbled and woke up.

  His father was standing at the door of the little room.

  Hamid felt his nose and ears, and was relieved to find that the rats had believed him.

  “Come out of there and write that poem down again,” he told him. Only later was Hamid to find out the reason for this change of heart. The rich cinema and theatre owner for whom his father was designing a series of posters had told him that some people had talents that no one could understand. The day before, at his theatre, he had listened to a boy who could sing the old songs and play the lute better than the majority of those asses who went about in black suits and called themselves musicians.

  Hamid’s right eye hurt terribly, and Siham laughed at his appearance. “You look like our neighbour Mahmoud,” she said to needle him. Mahmoud was a drunk who often got into brawls, which always left their mark on him. Siham shouted, “Mahmoud, Mahmoud,” from the inner courtyard until she got a slap in the face. She howled, and went to her bedroom.

  His father gave him a piece of best-quality paper and a reed pen. “Sit down here and write,” he said, when Hamid caressed the paper. The new reed pen was much better than his own, which he had cut from a reed with a kitchen knife. It lay comfortably in his hand, and its tip was sharp as a knife.

  The only trouble was that his father was standing right beside him.

  “Father, please will you take a couple of steps back,” he said without looking up. He spoke in a formal tone that he had never used to his father before and never used again. Many years later he realized that his future as a calligrapher had been decided in that short moment. And as he spoke, he looked at the sharp cobbler’s knife with which his father had trimmed the reed pen. It lay on the desk beside the inkwell. If his father beat him so badly again, he told himself, he would ram that knife into his belly.

  As if stunned, his father took two steps back, and Hamid swiftly wrote out the poem. He had watched for years as his father did calligraphy, and had never understood why, in all his work, he hesitated, made mistakes, had to wipe ink spots away and remove the last remains of them with a knife. Then he would moisten the place and smooth it with a little piece of marble, let it dry and rub it smooth again.

  Hamid looked at the poem one last time, narrowing his eyes. That was the only way he could assess the proportions of black and white accurately without pausing on any of the letters. He heaved a sigh of relief. The rhythm was right, the end result was even better than the first time.

  “Here’s the poem,” he said. There was no pride in his voice, only defiance. His father froze. He could not write as beautifully as that himself. The script had something that he had always been looking for and never found. Music. The characters seemed to be following a melody.

  “It was coincidence that you did that so well,” he said when he had control of himself again. “Now write: ‘You should honour and serve your parents.’ In Diwani script if you can.”

  “Yes, but keep away from the desk,” said Hamid, when he saw that his father was coming closer again.

  “As you like, but write what I dictated.”

  Hamid took a new sheet of paper and dipped the pen into the silver inkwell. His father’s ink had a musty smell. He was to remember that all his life, and he used to give his apprentices the job of stirring all the inkwells in his studio every day. If you don’t stir ink, it goes mouldy, and then it can’t be used. He always put a drop of camphor solution in his inkwell. The smell was invigorating. Other calligraphers perfumed their ink with jasmine, rose, or orange blossom.

  Under his father’s stern gaze he thought for a moment, then closed his eyes until he had found the form that would fit the words best: a wave of the sea.

  Then he wrote out the saying, and you might have thought that the characters formed the picture of a wave breaking.

  “I must show that to Master Serani,” cried his father. It was the first time Hamid had heard the name of the greatest Syrian calligrapher of his time.

  His father suddenly hugged him, kissed him, and wept. “God has given you all that I wanted for myself. Only he knows why, but I am proud of you. You are my son.”

  At last the great day came when Serani could see them. Hamid was to wear a suit for the first time. It was a light summer suit that his father had bought in one of the best clothes shops in the Souk al-Hamidiyyeh. Or rather, he had bartered for it; he did not pay money but did a deal with the shopkeeper: he would paint him a new shop sign in exchange for the suit. The old sign had been up for fifty years, and the paint was flaking here and there, so that you could hardly decipher it.

  “How long will you have to work to pay it off?” Hamid asked his father on the way back.

  “A week,” said his father. Hamid glanced back at the shop sign, then at the suit in the big bag he was carrying, and shook his head. He resolved that when he was his father’s age, he wouldn’t even have to spend a day working for a new suit.

  Master Serani had a large studio near the Umayyad Mosque, where he employed three journeymen, five assistants, and two errand boys.

  On that day Hamid realized what an insignificant figure his father cut. He had stopped twice outside Master Serani’s studio already, not daring to go in either time, and turning back. His hands were sweating. Only at the third attempt did he venture to open the door and humbly wish the master good day.

  Then he stood with his head bowed in front of the great calligrapher where he sat enthroned on his large chair. Serani was rather a small man. He had carefully combed his sparse hair, and his narrow, straight-cut moustache gave a touch of melancholy to his face, but his eyes were bright and lively. No one else had such eyes, eyes in which sadness, a keen mind, and anxiety mingled. Later, Hamid was often to find this first impression confirmed. Master Serani seldom laughed, he was very religious, and courteous but reserved, and when he spoke his words were worthy of a philosopher.

  Only one detail of his outer appearance seemed comic to Hamid; his right ear, which stuck out, was almost double the size of his left ear. It looked as if someone had been dragging the master round and round by his ear.

  “What brings you to me, Ahmad?” asked Serani, after briefly responding to his father’s greeting. His voice was civil and quiet, but designed to sound unfriendly and negative. Master Serani and his father had once been pupils of the famous calligrapher Mamdouh al-Sharif, and they had never got on well. Hamid’s father, who had wanted to earn money quickly, soon left the studio. He contented himself with commercial calligraphy that relied for its effect more on a colourful appearance than on art. Serani, however, was al-Sharif ’s best pupil, and stayed with him for over a decade until he had learnt all the mysteries of script. By the middle of the 1920s his reputation had reached Istanbul and Cairo, from where he received major commissions for the res
toration of historical artworks, mosques, and palaces.

  “It’s about my son Hamid,” said his father.

  Master Serani looked at the thin, small boy for a long time. Hamid did not fear the master’s gaze, and looked back. It was like a test, and Hamid had obviously convinced Master Serani. His gaze became milder, the trace of a smile flitted over the kindly, narrow face of the famous man, who was thirty-six at the time but looked like a fifty-year-old. “Then show me what you can do, my boy,” he said in a gentle voice, and he rose to his feet and took a reed pen out of a cupboard.

  “Which script do you prefer?” asked Serani.

  “Thuluth, master,” replied Hamid quietly.

  “Then write me the sentence with which everything begins,” said Serani. It was the most frequently repeated sentence in the Arabic language, written out again and again by calligraphers. All prayers, books, letters, speeches, law books, and Muslim writings – whether Arabic or otherwise – began with it: Bismillah ar-rahman ar-rahim. In the name of Allah the all-merciful, the compassionate.

  Hamid closed his eyes. Hundreds of variants of the phrase raced through his memory, but he could find none that he really liked. He did not know how long he had been thinking when he heard his father’s low voice: “Get on with it, the master doesn’t have all day…” But evidently the master looked at him angrily, for he fell silent again. About a year later Hamid was very glad to hear the master say that only when a calligraphic work appeared in your head as a clear image could your hand carry it out.

  At last Hamid found the form to express the musical sound of the devout prayer. As if on an accordion, the words were melodically extended and compressed. He opened his eyes and began to write. He wrote each word without lifting his pen, then dipped it in the inkwell and wrote on. The ink had a pleasant lemon-blossom fragrance. Master Serani loved those little blossoms, which were distilled in Damascus.